Silicon Valley sexism exposed by the New York Times

by philg

The Times story that I thought was interesting for what it revealed about how Americans think with numbers seems to have struck a nerve.

Here’s a Facebook post by Jason Pontin, former editor of MIT’s alumni magazine, Technology Review:

It should go without saying (but obviously does not) that the behavior described in the article is unacceptable at every level. This is not the culture that technology needs if it’s to really serve humanity. Megan Smith has often told me, “You play the whole team” when you attack a really big problem. But a significant number of powerful men were harassing the team.

I responded with

If I ask people to contact me if they love Michael Bolton as much as I do, and 24 people from Silicon Valley respond that they enjoyed listening to “When a Man Loves a Woman” while relaxing with VC friends, will you be convinced that a significant number of the Silicon Valley “powerful” are huge Michael Bolton fans?

Owen Linderholm, whose LinkedIn describes him as a “Senior Content Strategist at WePay” and living in the Bay Area:

If 24 people were murdered by men in silicon valley would that be a significant enough number for you? It’s significant because what they did is significant not because it is statistically significant with a large enough p-value.

I took the bait:

The NYT article describes conduct going back to 2009. So that’s an 8-year period. There were certainly a lot more than 24 murders in Silicon Valley during those 8 years (just one year). … can we infer from these data that part of Silicon Valley “culture” is murder? You would probably try to figure out the population so that you could turn the total number into a rate and then you would compare the murder rate in these cities and towns to murder rates nationally.

Owen and then Jason:

You really are deliberately obtuse aren’t you. Were those murders by silicon valley luminaries?

I mean, some of these people are a). Very well known; b). Have spent the last decade piously positioning themselves as “allies” to women entrepreneurs and feminism in general.

My response:

Now you sound like the Women’s Studies major who is shocked to learn that one of the guys in her college dorm was feigning interest in feminism when really what interested him was her body.

There was another sub-thread spawned by Steve Atlas, linking to a Fortune article:

“You Won’t Believe How Many Women in Tech Say They’ve Faced Sexual Harassment”

Trae Vassallo took the stand during Ellen Pao‘s discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins … Afterwards, she says an “overwhelming number” of women approached her to share their own stories of harassment. … The survey includes just over 200 women—most of whom have at least 10 years of tech experience—sourced from Vassallo and Madansky’s networks. … A whopping 60% of the women who participated reported experiencing unwanted sexual advances.

[Actually, Vassallo and Pao’s stories suggest that Kleiner Perkins did not use sex as a basis for promotion. Vassallo’s testimony at the trial was that a Kleiner partner tried to have sex with her, but she refused. She was not promoted to “senior partner.” Pao testified at trial that the same Kleiner partner, who happened to be married, tried to have sex with her and she agreed. Pao also was not promoted to “senior partner.” So the two women (maybe inadvertently) participated in a controlled experiment.]

My response:

Here’s my survey. Me and this guy that I know surveyed 200 people from our networks. We discovered that 100 of them are FAA-certificated pilots, 70 of them with airplane ratings, 30 with helicopter ratings, 20 dual-rated, and 12 type-rated for at least one turbojet-powered aircraft. From this I infer that roughly 50 percent of Americans have FAA pilot certificates and that about 15 percent of Americans enjoy flying helicopters.

That Fortune would publish this article without the journalist or editor noticing the absurd methodological flaws that would be plain to a middle school student in Singapore explains why America needs H-1Bs. Just imagine how much money you could lose hiring anyone associated with this survey or the people who couldn’t see the flaws.

I then linked to a couple of articles about the Gates Foundation wasting $1.7 billion on “small high schools” due to incompetence with math/statistics:

Jason Pontin came back:

I’ve deleted the modifier “significant” but you’re fooling yourself if you think this isn’t a problem. You’re like those fools who think it matters that the police are as statistically likely to shoot an unarmed black man – when African Americans are stopped far more often. So, too, I’ve never talked with a female entrepreneur who doesn’t have a story like this.

So it all ties back to Black Lives Matter? I checked in with a neighbor who has raised about $50 million in the venture capital world (two startups plus a fund). It turned out that she had never been approached for sex by a VC, but that she had been approached for sex by her boss when working at a large bank (she said “no”). Of course, this is the Boston-area VC world so things might be different in Silicon Valley, but Pontin was Boston-based when editing Technology Review.

One Facebooker reasonably asked “So many women bail out of high tech. Why?”

Could the answer be “Most women were never dumb enough to be in high tech in the first place and the smart ones certainly wouldn’t be taking startup risk.”

At a party on Saturday night a graphic artist/designer for a Boston-area financial services firm described programming as “dull and unpleasant.” Her theory for why most of the coders at her employer were from India with “They need a population of more than 1 billion before they can find enough people who only care about money and don’t care how dull and unpleasant a job is.”

“We know Silicon Valley is broken, so let’s fix it” (CNBC) describes a couple of women as “industry leaders.” One is GM lifer Mary Barra, who never tried to raise VC money or work in high-tech. The other is Sheryl Sandberg, who never tried to raise VC money or work at a small high-tech company (Sandberg joined Google when it was already hugely successful and Facebook in 2008 when it was already worth at least $15 billion (October 2007 value)). [Separately, the article has a subhead of “Silicon Valley’s moral high ground belies its rampant problems with sexism.” Moral high ground? The journalist and editors are convinced by some anecdotes of “rampant problems with sexism” in an area where total employment is 1.5 million?]

A friend recently attended a wedding. The bride was marrying an already-rich guy. My friend and his wife shared a table with three Harvard MBA women. None of them were working. All had married already-rich guys. (See “Litigation, Alimony, and Child Support in the U.S. Economy” for references to the effect of marriage and family law on women’s labor force participation, e.g., “only 35 percent of women who have earned MBAs after getting a bachelor’s degree from a top school are working full time”.)

If Silicon Valley has truly developed a culture in which women regularly have sex with VCs in order to get funding or jobs (and the subset of the sisterhood that refuses to participate in this quid pro quo is therefore disadvantaged), why are we only hearing about it now? A friend’s private message:

this is the time for sexual beta-males to come out and pounce on alpha males in groups

Since I don’t live or work in Silicon Valley it is tough for me to offer an opinion on what the “culture” might be, other than people try to make money so that they can afford $5 million starter homes. But I remain fascinated that major newspapers and magazines, people whose job seemingly depends on being smart, and college-educated Americans all uncritically accept inferences made about a sizable industry (at least 23,000 startups in Silicon Valley as of 2016) based on 24 anecdotal reports where the journalists had to reach back through 8 years to gather enough material for one article.

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26 thoughts on “Silicon Valley sexism exposed by the New York Times”

  1. “I remain fascinated that major newspapers and magazines, people whose job seemingly depends on being smart, and college-educated Americans all uncritically accept inferences made about a sizable industry […] based on 24 anecdotal reports”

    It appears that people who are believers in one of the major progressive dogmata (“women are always discriminated against no matter what”) simply do not accept a statistical argument they might have considered routinely otherwise: e.g. customer segment affinities in online advertising based on common buying patterns/zip code/etc. Would you argue physiological impossibility of the immaculate conception with a Christian ?

  2. Ivan: Sounds reasonable, but why so much emphasis on Silicon Valley? The Times could find 24 anecdotes over an 8-year period from almost any other industry, right?

  3. Consider that the stories that we have recently heard are the ones where the victims were willing to go on record with their name and risk a defamation lawsuit *despite* not having anything to gain from doing so themselves — i.e. they have written records or trustworthy public witnesses to their abuse.

    Niniane Wang has stated that she’s been trying to get a journalist to report on the behavior of the first VC to resign, Justin Caldbeck, for six years, but all were threatened into silence by him and his firm.

    We’re catching the stupid abusers — the ones who don’t know how not to get caught. We could infer that there have been many remaining abusers in this industry who are not as stupid.

  5. Chris: Nothing to gain? There is a some literature on what people gain by making false sexual harassment claims. See http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13218719.2015.1055854?journalCode=tppl20 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/8889137/

    (“prompted by the lure of victim status” and “wish for victim designation is a major driving force behind the claim”)

    How did we get to be a nation of victims if people don’t have anything to gain by becoming a recognized victim? (see https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-rise-of-victimhood-culture/404794/ )

  6. Is there any literature on what people gain by making *truthful* sexual harassment claims while also not filing lawsuits? These claims have ultimately been admitted to by the abusers. The motivations of people inventing abuse aren’t relevant.

    “Victim status” seems like it could easily be negatively valuable to these women, given that this is all public world news and it seems likely that they’re currently receiving death threats and other reprisals from it all. It seems far more likely that they wanted to make their industry safer for other women from serial abusers, while also getting some personal justice.

  7. @philg: Do you find it at all interesting that in your n=1 study you encountered a case of sexual harassment?

  8. Neal: Like Captain Renault, who was shocked to find gambling in Casablanca, I am shocked that my intelligent and vivacious neighbor, then in her 20s, was an object of sexual attraction for a man with whom she worked in close proximity on a daily basis.

  9. Chris: The reason academic psychologists are able to publish papers on this subject is that, at least for some people, there is value in obtaining victim status, even when there is no cash to be obtained.

    “These claims have ultimately been admitted to by the abusers.”? David McClure seems to have fallen on his sword, but I don’t see 24 men featured in the nytimes as admitting to whatever they are accused of by the 24 women.

  10. Neal: Of course, for an enterprise that wants to avoid both the costs of sexual harassment lawsuits and the costs of paying extra for the same skills (since Hillary Clinton says women will do the same work for 77 percent of the cost), the right answer is to hire an all-female workforce.

  11. @philg: You’ve now provided two ambiguous and somewhat contradictory descriptions of what your neighbor told you. Was it inappropriate sexual harassment or unrequited sexual attraction?

  12. Neal: I’m not the judge of everyone! Her boss wanted to have sex with her and disclosed that fact to her. Is that worse than the “face-touching at a tech gathering” described in the NY Times? I don’t know! The main point is that it was her boss in a bureaucratic enterprise that put the moves on her (unsuccessfully), not one of the many VCs with whom she had funding discussions.

    https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/publications/upload/currentissues.pdf says “unwelcome sexual advances” can be the basis of a lawsuit. So I don’t see any reason why she couldn’t have filed a sexual harassment lawsuit.

  14. “but why so much emphasis on Silicon Valley”

    I think the church has the most followers in the area followed arguably by NYC and Boston. For some of the followers there the mere hint at real or perceive slight is sufficient to satisfy their passionate religious inclinations, for others, whom one might call opportunistic believers, pecuniary interest is aligned rather well with the obligate signalling. I have quite a few acquaintances in both camps.

  16. >I’m not the judge of everyone!

    Certainly a true statement, but not an answer to the question I asked.

    >Her boss wanted to have sex with her
    >and disclosed that fact to her. Is that
    >worse than the “face-touching at a tech gathering”
    >described in the NY Times? I don’t know!

    Again, not an answer to the question I asked, which I’ll restate more precisely: Do you think, based on the exact words exchanged and the non-verbal cues which accompany all face to face or telephonic communications, that your neighbor was relating to you an incident of sexual harassment (as implied by context in the posting) or an episode of unrequited sexual attraction (as implied by your comment #8)? I’ll add a second question: Do you think your neighbor thought the incident was an incident of sexual harassment or unrequited sexual attraction or something else?

    >The main point is that it was her boss in a bureaucratic
    >enterprise that put the moves on her (unsuccessfully),
    >not one of the many VCs with whom she had
    >funding discussions.

    I did understand this. I inquired because of a different, perhaps unintended, potential implication of the ancedote.

  18. It all falls down under “heightening of class struggle as we progress building communism” thesis. Once you got rid of the old enemies, you need to come up with the new ones, however artificial those may seem, otherwise people may lose interest and stop paying attention.

  19. CNN probably sustained this nasty rumor mongering. I think the President should go after them by tweeting his old sorry ass being infantile back in his pro wrestling days. That’s the way to solve the nation’s problems.

  20. “Once you got rid of the old enemies”, you start eating your own flesh.

    Assuming we are at the farcical stage in history, the Bret Weinstein story looks pretty amusing given his self-proclaimed progressive affiliation. Parallels between the 1936 Stalin purges of the suspect party members and Weinstein’s plight are eerie but not altogether surprising.

    Here’s a Pravda article explaining why the good professor got what he deserved:

    https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/16/opinion/media-alt-right-evergreen-college.html

  21. >At a party on Saturday night a graphic artist/designer
    >for a Boston-area financial services firm described
    >programming as “dull and unpleasant.”

    You seem to be asking us to infer that women are less likely to enjoy programming than men from one comment by one women who is not a programmer with the added assumption that this difference is due to some inherent characteristic of women and not due to differential socialization. I have been in many factories where the most “dull and unpleasant” jobs were staffed primarily by women which does not really support this assertion.

  22. Neal: “Do you think your neighbor thought the incident was an incident of sexual harassment or unrequited sexual attraction or something else?”

    When you’re an expert witness and the other side’s attorney asks you a question like this, the attorney who hired you will say “Objection. Calls for a legal conclusion.” There is no way for a layperson to say what constitutes “sexual harassment.” Ultimately only a judge and/or jury can decide. The definition of “sexual harassment” is vague and therefore a layperson can only say what he or she observed or heard. After $1 million in legal fees there will be determination of whether the events described can be considered “sexual harassment.” (In my neighbor’s case, she wasn’t interested in making money as a sexual harassment plaintiff, so I don’t think she put a lot of thought into this, beyond saying “no thanks”.)

    Neal: “You seem to be asking us to infer that women are less likely to enjoy programming than men from one comment by one women”

    I’m not sure where you got that. This woman thought that programming was an unattractive career choice for anyone, regardless of gender ID. If there are more men doing it than women that either reflects fewer career alternatives for men and/or fewer non-wage-labor money-making alternatives for men.

  23. @philg: Thank you for the explanation of some of the legal technicalities, but this is not a court of law and I was not asking for your opinion as an expert witness. It is certainly possible for laypersons to have opinions on matters which may be adjudicated in a court of law, and a layperson’s opinion is what I was asking for. Granted, these opinions may not be consistent those rendered by a court or by individuals with legal training, but for the purposes of this discussion I don’t consider those potential discrepancies significant. I must commend your creativity in avoiding answering my questions without saying directly you don’t want to (or can’t) answer. Since I’ve asked several times and haven’t received a direct answer, I’ll run through all the major scenarios I see:

    1) The incident described by your neighbor was not sexual harassment because there is no such thing as sexual harassment or at least asking a workplace subordinate for sex never constitutes sexual harassment. If you consider this to be the case then I would say discussing the implications of this opinion is beyond the scope of this thread.

    2) The incident described could have been sexual harassment but was not because of mitigating circumstances not included in the posting. If this is the case, it would be a bit odd to include the information in a posting about sexual harassment, but on the other hand you seem to be implying this in comment #8.

    3) The incident was actually sexual harassment. In this case, it is ironic and amusing that in gathering data for a posting implying that the NY Times has cherry-picked 24 cases of sexual harassment and its incidence is actually low that the very first woman you tasked to reported an incident of sexual harassment (albeit of indeterminate severity and in a different industry than the one under discussion in the post).

  24. Neal: Your question really cannot be answered except by a jury that has heard testimony from everyone involved (and I guess even then only to a 51% confidence level). “Sexual harassment” is a technical/legal term. https://law.yale.edu/system/files/documents/pdf/Faculty/Siegel_IntroductionAShortHistoryOfSexualHarrasmentLaw.pdf says that the term didn’t even exist until 1974, nearly 10 years after I learned English (see page 8: “the term … grew out of a consciousness-raising session … on women and work”).

  25. Philg 15: If abuse is indeed pervasive in Silicon Valley, abusers choose Clinton!

  26. Gates wasted $1.7? Hell, I wasted more than that on a latte this morning.

    [original post fixed by moderator]

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